US, Russia Agree On Plan To Dispose of Syria's Chemical Weapons 256
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has announced an agreement between the U.S. and Russia on a plan for removing and destroying Syria's chemical weapons.
"Damascus will be given one week from now to give an inventory of its chemical arsenal and will have to allow international inspectors into Syria 'no later than November,' Kerry said after a third day of intense negotiations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva." The weapons must all be eliminated by mid-2014. "If Syrian President Bashar Assad fails to meet the demands, then a resolution to enforce compliance would be sought at the U.N. Security Council, Kerry said. The action could include sanctions, and Kerry said that the U.S. would reserve the right to use military force, but Russia remains opposed to any armed intervention." President Obama said, "The use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world is an affront to human dignity and a threat to the security of people everywhere. We have a duty to preserve a world free from the fear of chemical weapons for our children."
Resorting to Nonviolence (Score:4, Insightful)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has announced an agreement between the U.S. and Russia on a plan for removing and destroying Syria's chemical weapons.
I don't understand why we have to resort to reasonable non-violent solutions when we had a perfectly good rash hotheaded answer in bombing the bejeezus out of them. When will we stop the sanity?!?
Re:I still want... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How many *years* will this take? (Score:4, Insightful)
When someone points a gun at you and threatens to kill you, and someone else points a gun at them and says "look, you can kill that guy, but I'll kill you," that's not getting rolled. That's getting stopped. Getting rolled is when they take something from you while you're sleeping. Here, nothing was taken other than the opportunity to buy some new tomahawk missiles. Effectively, Putin saved the American taxpayers from getting rolled.
Re:I still want... (Score:5, Insightful)
It might technically be an appeal to tradition but here goes:
The people who survived WWI; the ones who saw close range trench warfare with stabbing of the enemy, shelling of trenches, pointless charges over no-man's-land to get cut down by machine guns, gangrene, and hearing the screams of people dying slowing in no-man's-land - those are the people who said that chemical weapons cross the line.
Re:Unrealistic expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
While you have a good point, you have to understand that this whole project is the ultimate kludge. We do what we must because we can.
1 - If / When it doesn't work, you now have a reason to go beat up Assad in whatever form you think you can get away with. It's almost as good as a UN resolution, perhaps better because Russia is behind it.
2 - It puts foreign, armed boots on the ground. And not little pansy assed blue helmets. Nasty troops with the appropriate backup. Now, this can backfire (as can anything else here) by having lots of Russian boots that act as a deterrent to the rebels but if you have both US and Russian inspectors on the ground, you will likely have both countries represented. The implied command and control needed for that can really stabilize the situation since neither country wants things to accelerate.
3 - You have the chance of getting the vast majority of the stocks out off the underground arms bazaar. This is the problem with Assad's chemical weapons. When he loses control over them (and apparently he has) you have all the nasties trying to get some. Sarin is a wonderful terrorist device. In some ways better than a nuc.
The world has apparently dodged a bullet with the USSR nuclear stockpile - it didn't get handed out to everyone with an agenda and a budget. We need to do the same for idiot Assad's chemical weapons. Unfortunately, the parallels between Irag and Syria are way too close for comfort. While Assad might not be as batshit insane as Hussein was, he's not all that far off. We don't have all that much freedom of movement in the Middle East and Russia has a bit more. For once, our interests are aligned a bit.
Re:I still want... (Score:5, Insightful)
As bad as any unreasonable killing can be, seeing someone or something suffer and die from exposure to chemical weapons is far more horrific imo. I'm sure there are videos floating around of animals being hit with these things. Watch some, then picture the same thing but with a human being. Chemical and biological weaponry simply has no place in any reasonable arsenal. A being shot or stabbed often kills within seconds and leaving the victim unaware of what has happened.
Being caught in a chemical weapons strike? Well, just watch those vids. I'm talking almost total agony for the last few minutes of your life, post exposure to any one of the various chemical agents used in chemical warfare. Ever had lockjaw or one of your muscles start contracting painfully and uncontrollably? Just imagine having that happen to every single muscle fiber in your body, leaving you writhing in the street covered in your own bodily fluids as you've lost control of bowel function and gasping for air as your lungs have stopped working due to the brain and nerve cells going haywire due to the nerve agent you just got hit with.
That's just a nerve agent. There's a variety of different substances out there, each one designed to have different effects on the human body. Blister agents (which cause just that, extreme blistering on every organic surface it comes accross, including the insides of your lungs), blood agents (destroys or otherwise disables the haemoglobin in your blood), the various nerve agents (G nerve, H nerve, which cause random junk signals to be passed down your nerves, sending muscles crazy and destroying and sort of control either concious or subconcious).
I hate that stuff. It's unpleasent just to even think of it. It's even more unpleasant to realise that these agents can linger in the environment and remain deadly for far longer than any land mine or shell or bomb. "Think of the children?" is quite appropriate here. I wouldn't want my kids to grow up, knowing that that shit was still around.
Re:Resorting to Nonviolence (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuke, napalm, depleted uranium, drones = ok.
Chemical = not ok.
Torture = Depends on who's doing it.
Re:I still want... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not acting would be pretty inconsistent with the idea of not allowing their use.
Whether Obama looks good or bad is irrelevant bullshit. In the end trying a diplomatic approach first is a win for Obama, Putin, and the human race as a whole.
That's what really counts.
Re:I still want... (Score:5, Insightful)
The bullets are being fired at (presumably) chosen targets who are fighting back. The chemical weapons aren't so precise (at least one hopes they weren't fired to deliberately kill massive numbers of non-combatants).
To de-politicize it, it's the distinction between two people trying to kill each other by firing guns at each other, and maybe a civilian gets hit in the crossfire. Versus someone spraying his gun indiscriminately into a crowd of civilians in hopes of hitting the one guy he wants to kill in the crowd. I'm not saying this is sufficient to justify international intervention, but it should be clear the latter is higher up on the "wrongness" scale.
If two people (or two groups of people) want to kill each other, there is generally not much the international community can do about it. They can try to broker a peace, but whether or not the conflict persists is ultimately up to the two parties at each others' throats. If they really want to kill each other, they're going to figure out a way to do it regardless of what the international community says or does. The best we can do is try to reduce the possibility of people who are not part of those groups being caught in the crossfire. Due to the indiscriminate and uncontrollable nature, chemical weapons represent a huge increase in the amount and scope of the crossfire.
Re:What was the goal again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Russia's view is that the chemical weapons were used by one of the rebel factions. By putting Assad's chemical weapons beyond use it doesn't matter if he used them or not, in either case neither side can use them again and blame the other.
Since there is no proof who did it that seems like the best compromise.
Re:Still dangerous after a generation in storage (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the chemical weapons breakdown into hazardous chemicals. And those hazardous chemicals have to be safely disposed of.
So instead of killing you because it is a nerve agent it will give you cancer and birth defects.
Re:I still want... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sarin kills in about 1 minute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin [wikipedia.org] It has the same effect as some of the paralytic drugs used for execution by lethal injection in the U.S.
I've read papers in the medical journals, including *.mil, about injuries from conventional weapons of the kind we used in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Napalm-type weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_77_bomb [wikipedia.org] can cause burns over 50% of your body that will kill you painfully over a week. Sarin is more horrific than that? I don't get it.
Sometimes bullets or bombs will kill immediately, but often they don't. People without access to advanced medical care, especially civilians in a war zone, will die slowly and painfully. Bombs produce burn injuries, with results similar to napalm. People have arms and legs blown off and die from blood loss and shock. Penetrating wounds get infected, and they die over a week. When buildings are destroyed, the people in them are crushed, and with compartment syndrome they die in a few days. War is horrific. Sarin is more horrific than the rest of it? I don't get it.
And Fritz Haber didn't get it either.
Re:I still want... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I still want... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are either a moron or dishonest (Score:0, Insightful)
MOST industrial countries have made and stockpiled chemical weapons. The Germans and the Japanese even tested them on captured prisoners (Captured American soldiers,sailors, and aviators were used as "test subjects" in both chemical AND biological weapons tests in Imperial Japan; The Germans had a penchant for using Jews as test subjects...) The French Had and used Chemicals as did the Brits... the list is endless.
Your thinly-veiled reference to the US use of "agent orange" in Vietnam is a giveaway... "Agent Orange" was a defoliant; the enemy at the time was using the heavy cover of the jungle to hide his activities so this defoliant was deployed to deprive him of that cover. Over the long-term, many bad effects were discovered and/or better understood and there were many people (on both sides, though obviously more on the Vietnamese side) who suffered... and the chemical is no longer in the inventory. Oh, and unlike probably any other country you might think superior, the US (without being compelled by anyone else) has sent numerous medical teams to our former enemy to try to help mitigate the effects.
The US use of nuclear weapons is unique ONLY because the US was first to complete a functional design (the Japanese and the Germans were both working on nuclear weapons at the time) and after using them to end WWII (a war that killed MILLIONS) everybody in the world was left in fear of the power of those weapons. At the moment in time when the US was the only nation with nukes, it made no effort to use that power to blackmail anybody... just as the US made no move to harm the Russian people at the moment the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet government collapsed.
It's lots of fun for hip young idiots to prove their coolness by pretending the US is accurately portrayed by Major Kong whooping it up as he falls astride a nuclear bomb in "Dr Strangelove"... but I defy you to name one other nation in the history of planet Earth that has protected/fed and/or freed more human beings outside its own borders, fought more wars not for its own benefit but to help others gain or recover their freedom and freely left more lands it conquered precisely because its own people do not want to be in charge of other people.
The US is imperfect because it is composed of imperfect people... but I will take it over any other civilization/nation in human history and whatever eventually replaces it will almost certainly be worse (using human history as a guide)
Re:I still want... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you're right but the post started by the GP are missing the actual problem with chemical weapons, none of this is the real reason chemical weapons are so bad. Especially the likes of Sarin.
You use different chemical weapons with different aims, quite rightly as you say VX is persistent so you use it if you want to deny access to an area whilst others like Sarin and Mustard gas aren't.
The reason Sarin for example is particularly bad is because it kills en-masse very quickly and leaves infrastructure intact. It reduces the cost of war, particularly this sort of civil war and it makes ethnic cleansing a dangerously cheap thing to do. Thus far the war has been expensive for Assad - he's had to literally destroy his most economically productive cities literally into nothing but rubble, and that's expensive. It means even if he wins there'll still have been a massive cost to his actions which act as a deterrent for further action, and for other dictators to do the same when they realise he may have won the war, but his country is now 3rd world which means even he personally will be poorer with no national wealth to sponge from.
Sarin does indeed degrade to be pretty harmless relatively quickly, which is why there were pictures of people stood by the delivery rockets of this particular attack only a short time afterwards, and why there were concerns that Assad's 5 day delay in letting the chemical weapons inspectors there could cause the loss of much evidence. The problem with a weapon like this that can kill a thousand people and leave nothing but a bunch of dead bodies and a small crater in the ground is that it leaves all the infrastructure intact. It makes war and ethnic cleansing relatively free of penalty for someone who does it.
Decided you don't like those of a particular religious sect sat in that corner of your city? Use Sarin! Within a day they'll all be dead and all you have to do is burn the bodies then your preferred religious sect can move in in their place and that section of the city remains productive because everything works like it did a day before the entire population was wiped out.
The drastically more indiscriminate nature is certainly a problem also as others have pointed out, the fact that even people hidden in basements and so forth will die to it. In the attack being discussed at the moment it seems around 200 people at minimum died from one single munition using even the low end figures (the high end would probably suggest maybe as many as 750 - 800 from a single munition). Judging from where the munition landed from pictures, even if it was built up rush hour I'd take a guess that at most an equivalently sized conventional purely explosive rocket would've only killed 50 at most.